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There’s nothing mysterious about the need for calibration. As Michael Wilm, business manager for calibration products, Renishaw Inc., West Dundee, Illinois, put it: “When you get gas for your car, you count on the pump being calibrated. That’s why we calibrate machine tools. If you don’t calibrate a machine tool you have no idea it’s going to give you reliable service for manufacturing your product.”

Speeding the flow of jobs through the shop, while maintaining top quality, ranks among the hallmarks of any successful manufacturing operation’s goals.

Hexagon Manufacturing Intelligence, a business unit of Hexagon AB, outlined its vision for the future of manufacturing at HxGN Live, the company’s annual digital solutions conference, held June 11-15 in Las Vegas.

The International Federation of Robotics (IFR) in 2016 showed unit sales figures in 2015 up 15% on the year before, reaching an all-time high of 253,748. Since 2010, technical improvements in robots and automation have turbocharged investment, according to the report.

The concept of attaching data to CAD models, such as GD&T, seems to be growing. Using model-based definition, the industry is beginning to take advantage of the technique.

Maybe your company specializes in aerospace or medical components, and you need to produce complex geometries in metals too tough to cut via conventional machining methods.

Materials science has opened new possibilities for designers of cars, planes and other products. Metal alloys are now as precisely engineered as they are machined. The result is longer lasting, stronger parts. But with a wider selection of materials comes risk—how can you be sure that one piece of gray metal stock is different than another? Careful warehousing procedures and paperwork only go so far.

Glenn Bridgman describes the difference between his shop’s manual grinders and its newest state-of-the-art CNC ID/OD grinder, a Studer CT960 OD/ID from United Grinding (Miamisburg, OH), as “feel vs. facts.” Bridgman, president of Bridge Tool & Die (Buckley, MI), believes that manual grinding is a somewhat personal operation.

In the manufacturing industry, the importance of metrology, or the science of measurement, is often underestimated. However, inspection is critical for ensuring products work and operate safely.

You don’t have to look too far to find tooling presetters that fit the machining requirements of just about any size shop. The value of off-line tool presetting—rather than stopping machine spindles to touch off tools as machines sit idle—continues to prove itself invaluable, especially to the smallest first-time user shops.